Except wrote:
D2 is dumb wrote:
True but still ranked behind 75 D1 schools. D2 is really dumb. Colorado School of Mines is average if compared to P5 schools academically.
Mines is the #84 national university and #34 public in the US News rankings... higher than six of the top 10 D1 finishers yesterday including their own state's flagship
I'll be blunt.
Mines is not a particularly great school. Most of you who discuss this do not have any perspective.
I am an alumni of Mines in mechanical engineering. Graduated, worked for 3 years, then started in the PhD program at UC San Diego. The difference in quality of the students in the mechanical engineering departments is VERY noticeable. I was enrolled in the Mech E curriculum at Mines, and TA'd for effectively the same curriculum at UCSD. Pretty much the entire upper 70% of students in any given class here would have made nearly all my classmates look like imbeciles. I can honestly say that the problem sets and material covered at Mines is pretty much the fundamentals of whatever topic it happened to be, and what they have at UCSD is far more mathematically and applicationally intensive. Hell, in 2 classes I TA'd UCSD covered a full Semester's worth of Mines' material in 7-8 weeks.
And the thing is, UCSD isn't even that exceptional of a school, and really doesn't have that strict of an admissions criteria for undergraduates (~35-40% if I remember correctly). I can honestly say that I don't fully understand where the difference is coming from, because the average test scores for Mines pretty much falls in line with UCSD as well.
The only thing I can really think of is that Mines self-selects based on the nature of the school, while most other state schools have to deal with a large assortment of students who shouldn't even be in college to begin with that bring down the test score average (you can argue whatever you want, but a major in Classical Studies has painfully limited job prospects, and students who perform poorly on the Math section of the ACT are NOT going to choose Engineering as a career path). Either that, or it's just that UCSD is packed with students of Chinese descent because California (my incoming graduate class was pretty much half-Chinese), and they can pretty much steamroll through most of the material.
The point is, Mines really isn't that great when compared to other Engineering schools. They could be good within Colorado, but Colorado really isn't great to begin with. I just didn't realize it until I left Colorado. Take the Mines students and toss them in the Engineering curriculum of UIUC, MIT, UCLA, UCSD, and whatever other highly ranked schools there are, and nearly all of them will probably be struggling.